We now understand that the entirety of Classical Thermodynamics is reducible to an assumption of this function, (that means we can prove the 1st Law by assuming the 2nd Law). In Statistical ...

Breaking the law The development of the classical laws of thermodynamics stretches back to the nineteenth century. They emerged from the effort to understand steam engines and other macroscopic ...

T he second law of thermodynamics underpins all of classical reality. It is the reason why it's easier to make things messy, why you can’t have perpetual motion, why you age, and maybe even why ...

Energy, time and complexity The roots of the problem lie in the fact that thermodynamics was formulated in the 19th century for classical objects -- for steam engines, refrigerators or glowing ...

In the end, thermodynamics wasn’t much help in making better engines and machinery. Instead, it became one of the central pillars of modern physics, providing criteria that govern all processes of ...

(Courtesy: Johannes Roßnagel) Physicists in Germany have taken mechanical miniaturization to the ultimate limit by producing a heat engine – one of the key inventions of classical thermodynamics ...

A recent study in Physical Review Letters explores quantum effects on black hole thermodynamics and geometry, focusing on extending two classical inequalities into the quantum regime. Black holes ...